The Sorrow That Put Me on the Pill

Thankfully my life goal is not to become a news reporter or journalist, because almost a full day after the Patriots embarrassing loss to the Jets I am finally telling you! Anyways, depending on the size of the rock you live under, chances are you have already heard this information.

For Patriots fans, that loss was brutal—an embarrassing, painful, soul crushing piece of diesel fuel-infused doggy doo. For football fans around the country, I’m willing to bet that watching another tower fall in the Parliament of the Patriots was both joy provoking and life affirming. And for the Jets, for those cocky sons of bitches, it was an orgasmic hallelujah. I should tell you that I am an extremely casual fan, and I have never been happier about that than today. In fact, I was whimsically writing haiku as I watched the four-hour snooze fest and one went like this:

A casual fan

Still feels pain when their home team

Loses a big game

While I was rooting about on the Internet finding whatever little inspiration I could to write this, I found this article:

I’m guessing from some guy out Minneapolis way. He makes a number of good points—football is a far too complicated, biased sport to be able to target quarterbacks like we do. They are the heroes or the falls guys, and quite frankly I don’t feel like either role would be too much fun for them. America has quite a fascination with the quarterback, in fact I saw a special on ESPN regarding the role of the quarterback in our minds. There really is no more interesting position in all of sports than the quarterback. The degree of intelligence, athletic prowess, confidence and all other manners of wherewithal that go into playing the position is unparalleled by any other position in any other sport.

I’m sure there about a million perspectives out there right now on the entity all to itself that is Tom Brady: that handsome, stylish motherfucker thought he could have it all, but he CAN’T; he is a clutch artist, he has lost his last three playoff games; it’s not all his fault, one player cannot win an entire game by himself (the position put forth in the previously linked article); whatever, I was tired of hearing about that guy anyways; and so on… My position is two-fold. One, it is indeed too harsh and cruel to assign the entire flood that turned the 14-2 Patriots into a floppy, wet rag last night to Tom— “Individuals do not win football games”. The second part of my position though is that Tom Brady fucked up. From about five minutes on, that game never felt winnable. There was a dark cloud about the stadium and all those jet planes were flying in and out of the cover, dropping bombs on the losers below and the Patriots with their artillery guns down below were pathetically putting up a defense. The ridiculous botched punt, all the running plays on the Pats final touchdown drive (killing a huge amount of time), and all the other missteps that I cannot quite remember left nothing to the imagination: the Pats were going to lose. But what happened in the first five minutes? Oh yeah, Brady threw an absurd interception on a juggernaut of a drive down the field, giving up all the field position they had so boldly just earned, killing all their momentum and giving the Jets an easy three points. Granted, Crumpler also dropped a touchdown pass that should have been caught, but that was the second drive and also that happens more often. How friggin’ long had it been since Brady threw a pick?

It is not fair to assign all the blame to one person, but goddamn Brady, you should not have thrown that pick.